Mark Reinsberg 35 min read

A teenage gang leader flies back to her Callisto hideout facing a python-whip duel over leadership, and remembering how easily her parents believed she'd gone off to a nice school on Mars.

Mark Reinsberg's 1958 story is a sharp dystopian and social-SF satire. Clever, pointed golden-age SF. Read it for a mordant future-delinquency tale that projects juvenile rebellion into the spaceways, following a hardened young gang-runner, in a witty golden-age piece that skewers both wayward youth and clueless parents.

In its time

Published in 1958, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

35 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).

Illustrated by

D. Bruce Berry